Windows Vista - King Crimson or Red Giant?

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At this stage in the proceedings you might start to wonder why Microsoft has cruelly forgotten about its long-suffering customers, but this is where things get interesting.

The key point is that the PC and laptop owners who use Windows aren’t Microsoft’s customers. This sounds bewildering but if you have a problem with Windows your point of contact is whoever sold it to you, which typically means your PC manufacturer. Dell, Evesham, Fujitsu Siemens, HP and Mesh are customers of Microsoft, as are various Microsoft distributors along with government departments and corporations that are large enough to buy direct from Microsoft. It doesn’t much matter whether we end-users like Windows Vista or not as every new PC will inevitably ship with Vista so give it two or three years (surely minutes…ed) and Vista will inevitably be the dominant Operating System.

I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if the upgrade market from Windows XP to Windows Vista was relatively tiny, but if every new PC ships with Vista the only plausible fly in the ointment will be if Apple starts to offer boxed versions of Mac OS X for installation on PC hardware, and even that will surely have a marginal effect.

In the event that gamers decide to shy away from Windows Vista, well Microsoft has that covered with its Xbox 360, and the same is true if you fancy watching HD DVD but don’t want to splash out for a Media Center PCas you can buy a USB HD DVD drive for your Xbox 360 at a very reasonable price.

So it’s 2010 or 2011 and Vista is dominant, dual-core processors are mainstream and we’ve all got used to the HDMI connector on our monitors, TVs and graphics cards. Everyone has a minimum 2Mbps Broadband with the option of 20Mbps at a reasonable price and it’s my guess that this is when Vista will kick up a gear as a platform for the delivery of media including TV over IP. The ludicrous fight in Hollywood between Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be seen as yet another nail in the coffin of physical media as we inevitably move towards a world where we get movies, TV and music on demand, instead of waiting for the starting time as you sit patiently on your sofa.

This new approach requires a secure platform that will reduce the incidents of illegitimate copying of high quality digital content. At the very least Hollywood and the music studios have to feel that the delivery platform is secure enough to earn them a decent profit, and if Windows Vista can achieve that end as a unified set top box that serves a number of companies simultaneously then they will doubtless embrace it with open arms.

Of course it’ll be we end-users who pay for the hardware and it’ll also be us who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous DRM and so too will we pay for the delivery of the content. That may sound like something of a poor deal, especially if we continue to pay for 43 minutes of TV per hour of programming interspersed with 17 minutes of advertising, and while I quite agree I have a horrible suspicion that it’s the future. In that light is it any surprise that the Vista launch contained very little substance. Thank goodness we have the Aero interface to distract our attention.

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